How to Migrate the VM’s to vSphere Distributed Switch ?

When it comes to VMware networking , you should know about VSS (vSphere Standard Switch) and VDS (vSphere Distributed Switch). This article is going to demonstrate the migration of virtual machines from VSS (vSphere Standard Switch) to VDS (vSphere Distributed Switch). First we will see why do we need to virtualize the networking in VMware environment.The virtual networking provides various services to ESXI host and VM guests. Using the virtual network services , you can connect the virtual machine to the physical network and connect to the VMkernel services like NFS,iSCSI and vMotion to the physical network environment.

What is the Difference between VSS and VDS? VSS is controlled on the local host level .But VDS is controlled from vCenter server.If you use VSS, maintaining the similar network configuration across all the ESXi is very difficult. But in VDS, same configuration will be pushed across all the ESXi hosts from the vCenter server. If there is any configuration mismatch on the network level , You may not be able to migrate the VM’s to another host using VMotion. So these kind of issues will be eliminated if you use VDS (vSphere Distributed Switch). VDS also supports third part virtual switches.

In this article , i am going to demonstrate the migration of two virtual machines from VSS (vSphere standard switch)to VDS (vSphere Distributed switch).

Environment:vSphere 5.5

Impact : No impact to the VM machines. This migration is completely transparent.

Virtual machines Names:

VOVA

SUSE-Linux

1.Login to vSphere Client and determine the virtual machine’s current network.

VOVA networking info

Here is the networking information for SUSE-Linux VM and you can see its using vSphere standard switch.

Host Networking view – SUSE-Linux

If you do not have existing vSphere distributed virtual switch,just create it by following this article.Here i have already created the vSphere distributed switch and added the ESXi hosts to that.Refer this article.

2.Navigate it to Home- > Inventory – > Networking . Just right Click the VDS switch to migrate the VM’s to it .

Migrating virtual machine from VSS to VDS

3.In this wizard , you need to select the source network and destination network for VM’s that needs to be migrated .Here i have select the VM network as source (Which is my VSS network) and destination network as vSphere distributed switch(UA-VDS1)

Select Source and Destination network

4.Select the VM’s which needs to be migrated to vSphere distributed switch.

Select the VM for VSS to VDS migration

5.Here is the summary of the migration. Click finish to start the live migration from vSphere standard switch to vSphere distributed switch.

Summary of the live VSS to VDS migration

6.You can monitor the activity in the task list .

Task details of Live VSS to VDS migration

7.Click on the vSphere distributed port group and see new ports active for VM’s.